


Pygmalion aux pieds de sa statue qui s'anime

by alcibiades



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Past Bucky/OFC, Pining, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Trans Character, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-31
Updated: 2015-01-31
Packaged: 2018-03-09 18:30:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3259940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alcibiades/pseuds/alcibiades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Steve Rogers met Bucky Barnes, Bucky was called Rebecca.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pygmalion aux pieds de sa statue qui s'anime

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mr-finch (soubriquet)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soubriquet/gifts).



There are a lot of things the history books get wrong about Bucky.

By the time Steve is unfrozen and awake again, he's not sure if he should correct them. Bucky spent so much of his life trying to appear to be exactly who he said he was, after all, that it doesn't seem right. But still, Steve knows, he _knows_ different, and --

Let's start at the beginning.

The first time Steve Rogers met Bucky Barnes, Bucky was called Rebecca. Becky. Bucky-then-Becky had two long braids of silky dark hair and big blue eyes, and Becky was pulling two boys off Steve and shouting at them, "Go the fuck home! What are you doing?" and then smiling at Steve and saying, "My ma'd skin me alive if she knew I was talking that way."

Steve thought to himself, _there's something different about this one_ , and his first impression turned out to be right. Bucky-then-Becky eschewed the company of the girls in their classes, and the rest of the boys too: Steve was the only exception. Bucky stuck to his side like glue, and the only reason for it that Steve could see was that the two of them were like square pegs shoved into round holes.

Except that Bucky _wasn't_. Bucky was somehow an expert at keeping the two discrete identities separate. In classes, Bucky was Becky: straight-backed, polite to a fault, always with a raised hand, quick with answers. On the streets, Bucky was fast and wicked with a mean right hook, would follow Steve into bad neighborhoods and dark alleys. Bucky would stand in front of Steve to keep the bigger guys from coming back, and Bucky would spit at them when they'd sneer and say there was no sense in fighting a girl.

The years that they were teenagers were, without a doubt, the worst of Steve's life. Everything changed; there was a realization, one that dawned on him slowly like a shadow creeping up until it was too dark not to see, that he did not want from Bucky what he thought he would always want. He had always imagined them as the most steadfast of friends, and when he suddenly saw the curve of Bucky's mouth as something that he wanted to kiss, it was the surest of all the betrayals his body would level at him in those few years.

It was a relief that Bucky (still called Becky, then) remained flat-chested, that Bucky grew as tall as some of the boys in their class. It was a relief when Bucky's long, dark mane of wavy hair was cut off to nearly chin-length in the heat of the summer that Bucky was fifteen. It was a relief that Bucky did not start wearing lipstick, that Bucky changed out of the proper school clothes that Edith Barnes insisted on and into Steve's trousers and loose shirts as soon as they were out of sight of the nuns and their classmates. It was a relief, but not much of one.

The year that Steve turned 16, Bucky acquired a job. It would remain forever uncertain to Steve what, exactly, compelled the grocer to hire Bucky. It wasn't work that was fit for a young lady to do, and Bucky was somehow still adept at projecting the image of a young lady to just about everyone except Steve. Steve was the only one who was different, though he couldn't for the life of him understand why.

Things changed, though. Bucky changed. Bucky worked after school and on weekends, hauling crates and breaking down boxes, and Bucky's mother shook her head and dismayed over Bucky's arms, which developed a wiry, muscled strength. Bucky's broad shoulders, and narrow hips, though Bucky was certainly still beautiful enough, with a red mouth and a dimpled chin, to turn plenty of heads, and did.

"I want to move out," Bucky said, sleeves rolled up. Hands still small, though. Lovely hands, tapered fingers, short oval-shaped nails. Head tipped back, long eyelashes. "I'm saving up money. I can't live with Ma and all of them anymore."

Steve couldn't imagine why. "You're going to live by yourself?" he said. That wasn't really - it wasn't _something_. Wasn't done, wasn't safe.

Bucky looked at him, reaching up to peel a curl of hair away from one sweaty cheek. "I don't know," Bucky said. "I'll figure it out."

Then, when Steve's mother died, Bucky was so insistent that they move in together. Steve couldn't work it out for the longest time; Bucky's parents were still alive, Bucky could live in their home rent-free, and their house was nicer than anything that Bucky and Steve could hope to afford together. But then he realized - maybe it was when Bucky took him across town to look at a place clear on the opposite end of Brooklyn, or maybe much, much later, what this meant for Bucky: A chance to live somewhere where nobody would know either of them from Adam.

He didn't know why Bucky's parents allowed it to happen - and maybe they didn't. It certainly wasn't proper, the two of them living together like that, except that Steve was categorically not seen as a threat, in those days. And he wasn't. Nobody was a threat to Bucky, at least not as Steve remembers it.

"James Barnes," said Bucky, looking around the dingy, small space of their new apartment.

"What?" Steve asked. Bucky today: hair shoved up under a flat cap, wearing Steve's clothes, his spare set. Steve was wearing the nicer ones, although he felt like he looked second-rate compared to Bucky nonetheless.

"James Buchanan Barnes," Bucky said. "Bucky. Sounds good, doesn't it?"

"Sure," Steve replied, perplexed. "You want me to call you that now?"

"It's only one letter difference," Bucky replied, turning slowly, hands on hips. "You don't mind, do you?"

"I guess not," Steve said, and that was that.

It was easy. Nobody questioned where they had come from. Nobody had the time or the inclination to care. Bucky took two jobs where he didn't have to do a lot of talking, and anyway he had somehow developed this other voice, a voice Steve had not really heard before but soon became second nature. A low, gruff voice, the cadence of it completely masculine. He used that voice all the time now, and it was easy for Steve to think of him as Bucky. It wasn't much of a change at all.

Bucky cut his hair shorter. He filled out further. He still undressed away from Steve, when he could, but when he couldn't, Steve saw sometimes the hard muscles of his back and shoulders, the cloth he kept tightly wound around his chest. He didn't look like a woman at all; he had more in common with the Bible heroes in the old paintings than with any woman Steve had ever seen.

They did not see Bucky's family. Steve didn't know if the Barneses even had the address of their new place. And soon -- Bucky started seeing women.

Bucky had always been a good dancer; there had always been boys lining up to dance with Bucky at all the ice cream socials, and now that he could lead, he was even better. Women loved him. Women flocked to him, with his long eyelashes, his easy charm, and his ready smiles, like they had never flocked to Steve. And suddenly, Bucky had dates all the time. Pretty girls, girls who were buxom and wore lipstick, girls who curled their hair and danced a mean Lindy Hop. Girls who had reputations too good to ever come home with him.

Sometimes Steve had these thoughts - that he wished Bucky had been all right with being Becky, because things could have been different between them. He could have married Becky, could have kissed her, brushed her long dark hair. Bucky had always been the only person who really paid attention to him, even if he had never really been a girl.

He knew that it was selfishness. He kept it tamped down, hidden away. He was trying to be less selfish, these days; Bucky did so much. Bucky was so generous. The least Steve could do was try.

He came home once, a night when he was supposed to be lettering signage at the store until late, and found Bucky in their apartment with a girl. The memory is burned into his mind clearly even now: He had come up the back way, didn't feel like running into any of their neighbors, who liked Bucky but disdained Steve. He heard voices before he saw anything. A girl's voice, an unfamiliar one. Not any of the girls Bucky had taken out before. And she wasn't really _saying_ anything, just -- making noises.

Steve stopped, his hand on the doorknob. He listened a little longer, until he heard Bucky's voice too: "That's good, sweetheart," Bucky said. "Just like that."

Steve knew he should just go for a walk around the block. That was what was done in these situations, he knew, even if he hadn't ever encountered this particular situation before. Instead, he went to the window and looked inside. He could see Bucky, and the girl, a blonde wearing an orange-cream-colored dress that was rucked up around her waist. Her legs spread, stockings all awry, with Bucky's hand between them.

The girl sighed and moaned and said, "Bucky!" and Steve watched until her thighs shook and Bucky pulled his hand away, and then the rest of himself, too, when she reached for him.

"Won't you let me?" the girl asked. She was pretty, Steve saw, even flushed and disarrayed. She reached for Bucky's shirt, Bucky's pants, and Bucky disentangled her fingers gently. "Bucky, I just want to make you feel good."

"You did, honey," Bucky said. "Don't worry about it." He kissed the back of her hand and smiled at her, and she pouted but set about putting herself to rights. Steve, flushed and somehow a little angry, did go walk around the block then, and when he came back, he pretended he hadn't seen anything at all, and Bucky didn't mention it.

+++

Everything was all right for a while before the war broke out - all right in a relative sense of the word, but Steve couldn't think of a time when his life had been just 'all right' without some modifiers attached. But it didn't matter, because then the United States was at war, and everything changed again.

All the guys that Bucky worked with were getting drafted or enlisting. Bucky lasted as long as he could stand it, but one night he came home, grease on his hands, a smear along his forearm, and said, "I've got to go down there, Steve. It's going to look wrong if I don't."

"But," Steve said, and then, when Bucky looked at him, "Never mind. I'll come with you." Maybe Bucky would get thrown in jail; maybe they both would. But he knew what Bucky meant. At least coming back with a rejection slip would look better than not having tried at all. And soon enough they'd both be back in Brooklyn, or -- maybe they would take Steve, after all.

That wasn't the way it went, though. Steve watched with a sense of amused resignation as they stamped his slip "4F," but the resignation melted into a sense of terror and anger when he saw Bucky, white-faced, his expression drawn.

He showed Steve the paper. "1A," it said.

"He hardly even looked at me," Bucky said. "He hardly looked at me. He didn't even make me take my shirt off."

They walked home in silence. Bucky's posture was miserable, his head slumped, his hair falling forward into his face. "I'll go back tomorrow," Steve said. "Or -- there's another office, over in Bay Ridge, I'll go over there. It'll be fine, I've just got a cough today from the weather --"

"It doesn't matter," Bucky said. "I'll still have to go."

Steve said, "Or we can -- we can move again. Out of state, maybe." He ignored the rolling feeling in the pit of his stomach telling him that he would hate himself, if that was what it came to. "We'll figure something out, Bucky, we can --"

"Shut up, would you," Bucky said, sitting down heavily in his favorite chair -- his only chair -- and putting his head into his hands. "I've got to think."

Steve sat down across from him, sick and unhappy, trapped by his own cage of a body as he ever had been, as Bucky ever had been, except that it should be _him_ holding that 1A, and Bucky shouldn't ever have had to go at all. He couldn't see Bucky's face, and when at last Bucky lifted his head, he thought maybe it had been better that way, because he could tell Bucky had been crying a little. "I have to go," Bucky said.

It turned out that Bucky had saved a lot of money. It was all squirreled away in hidey-holes all over their apartment, rolls of cash that he presented to Steve on their kitchen table with an air of solemnity that made Steve feel like he was attending his own funeral - or worse, Bucky's. "They'll kick me out sooner or later," Bucky said. "Until then, this should be enough to last you."

Steve didn't say anything. He was mad, mad as hell, and partly at Bucky, though he didn't know why. He was madder when he got another 4F the next day, and then the next again after that. A long line of dismissals, until finally time came for Bucky to pack up and go off to Basic.

"I won't be gone for long," Bucky said. "Do the goddamn dishes, will you? And make sure you slam the door when you lock it."

"I know that," Steve said, staring up at Bucky, whose chin trembled a little. _Say something_ , he thought to himself. _Tell Bucky he can't leave._ But he couldn't. He didn't.

And Bucky didn't get kicked out of Basic. In fact, from Bucky's letters, he was, as always, top of his class, and there were all these unmentioned vagaries that filled Steve's mind: How did Bucky shower? How did he go to the bathroom, without anyone seeing? But Bucky had had a lot of practice by now, and Bucky was clever and not a little sneaky, and all Steve could figure out was that somehow, Bucky was managing.

He managed and managed, and came home with a hard set to his jaw and his hair cut shorter than it had been last time Steve had seen him. "Still no luck, huh?" he said to Steve, putting his arm around Steve's shoulders. "How many times have you gone?"

"I was going to go out to Hackensack tonight," Steve said, and Bucky laughed and shook his head.

"I'm leaving in two days," he said. "I'm not wasting my time going to god damn New Jersey, Steve," and instead he dragged Steve to a bar and made Steve dance a little. It should have made Steve feel better, but instead it made Steve feel like twice the piece of shit he already had.

Two days later, it didn't matter anyway.

+++

He found Bucky again, and Bucky was the same, but different. Any lingering softness had been stripped from him, and looking at him from this angle, looking _down_ at him as he leaned on Steve, as they walked out of the base, Steve thought, _did you always look like this?_

"What the hell did they do to you," Bucky said raggedly, pausing to catch his breath, hands on his stomach, and then, reaching underneath his shirt, pulling out a dirty strip of cloth and tossing it aside. There was no real visible change in his silhouette, and Steve wondered vaguely, why, then, for all these years.

"It was a serum," Steve said. "The idea was to make soldiers -- better. Faster, stronger, I guess."

"It worked," Bucky said, raising an eyebrow at Steve. He touched Steve's arm, under the leather jacket. "Lucky you." And was there bitterness in his voice? Maybe there was. Maybe Steve couldn't fault it.

The bitterness stayed; it was there when Bucky looked at Peggy in the bar, and even thereafter. It didn't change anything, really. Bucky as a second-in-command was competent, capable. Bucky smiled at Steve and joked with him, and if his smile fell away when he thought Steve wasn't looking, well, that was none of Steve's business. Maybe he would have made it his business, before, but there was a war on and --

Then Bucky was dead. It was a moot point.

+++

Bucky was not dead. Is not dead.

He doesn't let Steve find him for a long time. Eventually, he comes back to Steve, stands on Steve's doorway, dripping wet from the rain, a puddle forming around his heavy boots.

Steve steps back from the door. Steve lets him in. Bucky doesn't talk for almost an entire month, and then, slowly, he starts to get better. It is yet another time in Steve's life that Bucky is different, but the same. And this time -- this time he knows there's not a chance in hell that he's letting Bucky go again.

Bucky was never precisely shy, before, but now any pretense or hesitance has been done away with entirely. He takes his shirt off after sparring with Steve, just whips it over his head, using it to mop the sweat from his face, and Steve looks at him.

The biggest thing is the arm, of course; that's the obvious thing, the thing that's impossible to miss. But if you get past that, and you have to -- Steve has to -- there's more to it than that. Bucky's shaped differently - the breadth of his chest is wider, and not that Steve has ever seen him naked, but he knows enough to know that even if Bucky was flat-chested before, it wasn't the same as this. There's no hint at all that Bucky ever had breasts, there are only solidly-defined planes of chest muscle, even a slight dusting of hair.

Bucky catches him looking, of course, and grins. Even his face is a little different, his jaw a touch wider, maybe, and lined with stubble now where it had always been baby-smooth before. "What did they do to you?" Steve asks, not for the first time.

"I don't know," Bucky says. "Hormones, maybe." He shrugs, putting his shirt back on, and Steve doesn't say anything, though he wishes Bucky hadn't covered up. "You should have seen the look on their faces when they pulled the pants off me and figured out what they'd really gotten."

Steve doesn't want to imagine it. "But you don't have --" he says.

"A penis?" Bucky smirks a little, ducks his head, shakes it. "Honestly, at this point, I don't know if I'd even know what to do with one. Kind of got used to the rest of this without it."

He starts to walk away, flipping a hand up through the back of his hair, and Steve has had it. Finally he says, "Bucky, wait," and Bucky turns around again, eyebrows raised, questioning.

"You don't need," Steve says -- starts to say, and then stops. "You look good," he says instead. "You look -- you've always looked good. To me."

Bucky comes back toward Steve, his hips rolling as he walks. He looks easy, like he's had practice in this body, except that he always looked like that. Like somehow he was more comfortable with himself, even born with the wrong set of parts, born into a body he shouldn't have been, than Steve can ever remember feeling. Even now, even now that they've made Bucky's body into a weapon, that they've changed him again, he still looks natural this way.

He's taller than he was before, too, but even that makes sense; the serum made Steve taller, after all. Why not Bucky? "I wanted to marry you," he says to Bucky. "When I turned thirteen, I realized I wanted to marry you."

"Yeah?" Bucky asks, very close to Steve. "Not anymore?"

"I don't know," Steve says. "We've changed, we've both changed."

"Well," Bucky says, "Luckily, so have the laws."

He turns away again, walking toward the elevator, and neither of them says a word until they get back to their floor. In fact, Bucky still doesn't say anything, just walks toward the bathroom, and Steve follows him. Bucky strips off his shirt again, turning on the shower, and then looks at Steve over his shoulder, hooking his thumbs into the waistband of his sweatpants and tugging them down.

From the back, nobody would be able to tell at all. And truthfully, when Bucky turns toward Steve and Steve looks at him, from toes to crown, there's nothing that looks _amiss_ to Steve. Nothing looks _wrong,_ or out of place, except maybe the arm. There's just Bucky - muscled biceps, trim waist, narrow hips, a flat stomach, a faint trail that leads down to a dark vee of hair between his legs.

Steve just looks at him for a while, and it takes Bucky ducking under the water to shake him out of his reverie. He yanks his own shirt off, pulls his shorts down, kicks them to the side. "Bucky," he says, and Bucky turns to look at him, slicking his hair back. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah, still."

Bucky tilts his head, water running into his open mouth, and Steve gets in the shower too, puts his hands on Bucky's face, and kisses him.

Steve has had very little sex of any kind, but Bucky is a better guide to his own body than anybody else could be anyway. When Steve slides his hand down Bucky's front, Bucky says, "Yeah, you can touch me there," so Steve does, and when Steve's cock nudges up against Bucky's thigh, Bucky says, "I want you inside me."

It doesn't feel as good as Steve always imagined; it feels better. He says Bucky's name into Bucky's mouth, and Bucky answers him with moans. When Bucky comes, he clenches down around Steve, and Steve can _feel_ all those muscles working, and it makes him come too.

Afterwards Steve is jelly-legged and tired, and Bucky says, "Let's get in bed." They lie there for a while, and Steve honestly thinks maybe he could just look at Bucky forever. Bucky's beautiful blue-grey eyes, laugh lines at the corner of them. The particular slope of Bucky's nose, upturned at the end. The dimple in his chin.

"Have you done that before?" he asks Bucky eventually.

"Oh yeah," Bucky says. "Not in the shower, and not with anyone I thought I'd ever have a chance in hell of seeing again, though."

"Does it -- bother you?" Steve asks.

Bucky raises his eyebrows, lifts the waistband of his briefs, and points inside, smirking. "Yeah," says Steve, embarrassed.

"No," Bucky says. "It doesn't bother me. It feels good. C'mere."

Steve rolls over and ends up half on top of Bucky, and Bucky takes Steve's hand, sucks two of Steve's fingers into his mouth, and slides Steve's hand down his body. "I'll show you," he says, smiling a little, and Steve watches his face intently, the way that his expression changes, the pink flush that rises in his cheeks.

+++

Now more than ever, the people who write history are confused. James Barnes confuses them. There's no record that he ever existed, before the Army. No James Buchanan Barnes born in Brooklyn whose presence is attested to by anyone other than Steve Rogers. Nobody can figure it out, and Steve thinks maybe nobody ever needs to tell them.

"What do you think they'd say, if they knew?" Bucky asks. His hair is short again, but longer on top, falls in waves over his forehead when he tilts his head.

"I don't know," Steve says. "Do you want them to know? Do you want to tell them?" He thinks: There are a lot of kids out there, and maybe it could help them, knowing. Looking at Bucky and seeing something of themselves reflected back. But does everyone deserve to know? Does Bucky want to let this go, now that, in the eye of the public, he is exactly who he says he is?

"Maybe," Bucky says, shifting closer to Steve. "Maybe." He smiles, and that smile is only the latest in a long series of miracles in Steve's life. "Not right now, but maybe soon."

**Author's Note:**

> I dreamed this and it wouldn't let me rest until I'd written it. Thanks for reading! You can find me [here](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com) on tumblr.


End file.
